Billions of people move to a new country each year. Some move to be closer to their families; some to find better work, and some to escape death.

But we Americans can get a skewed view of immigration from our domestic media outlets, which often focus on refugees and immigration from only a handful of counties--and mostly into the US. World migration is bigger and more complicated than we often hear.

Here's a brief tour of international and US migration.

The map below shows where foreign nationals lived abroad in 2017. Select an origin country (below the map) to see where where people from that country live now. Hover over each country for details; you can pan or scroll to zoom. Try selecting a few countries you hear a lot about (maybe Mexico or Syria) and a few you don't (perhaps Bangladesh or Angola).

Try selecting Mongolia as the country of origin. Are you surprised that no (or very few) Mongolians lived in China, despite the geographical proximity? What might cause Mongolians to leave home? Mongolia is just one such thought experiment for someone interested in history and anthropology. If we could model immigration mathematically, what factors influence a person's decision to move? Do political and cultural differences between the origin and destination countries matter, or is immigration purely an economic decision?

The US

Immigration to the US has been increasing in recent decades, but looking at historical rates of immigration can place the present in a new light. The graph below, from the National Academy of Sciences, shows that immigrants constituted a much larger share of the US population in the 1800s. And one could argue the share was even higher, since the only true "non-immigrants" in this story are Native Americans.

We hear a lot about immigration from the Middle East and Central America, but those numbers are smaller than we might think, while immigration from Europe and Asia is larger than we might think. Try moving the slider and hovering over points in the map below to see how the foreign-born population of the US has changed over time.

What share of all foreign-born residents does each region represent? Central American immigrants make up about a third of the total, as do immigrants from different parts of the Asian continent (from Pakistan to Japan), while Caribbean immigrants make up roughly 10%. This graph shows how these percentages have changed over time.

How have public attitudes towards immigration changed over time? You can think of the news media as a proxy for the conversations Americans have had about immigration generally. Chronicling America from the Library of Congress is a searchable repository of historical newspaper articles.

News mentions of immigration has tracked immigration over time:

While the relationship between immigration levels and negative coverage is less clear:

About these graphics

We imagined this map as a fun, interactive tool for people to explore world immigration trends, either in class, or out of pure curiosity. We hope this visual tool can spark deeper conversations about immigration, and how it contributes to our understanding of humans' motives and decision making.